For comparing current results to historical to look for anomalous changes.

> How is that helpful?

It helps eliminate benign anomalous results in emergencies. I have a low neutrophil count. It is totally uneventful. Having that baseline means if I’m sick and have the works run, doctors need not start treating my neutropenia—that wasn’t caused by whatever is going on.

More broadly, catching a vitamin D deficiency and allergy early probably saved some years of life and definitely improved my quality of life.

Some doctors are test happy. Most are not. Finding the right fit is part of being a human in the midst of modern healthcare.

Was your vitamin D deficiency and allergy related to long COVID?

> Was your vitamin D deficiency and allergy related to long COVID

Nope. Indoor lifestyle and and a proclivity for cold weather. And, like, allergies.

The person that you responded to was not the one who made the covid claim.

I think it was a bit jarring to have that comment on the covid chain since their experiences are not related.

> Some doctors are test happy. Most are not.

In my family we detected lung cancer in stage 2b instead of stage 1 because we spent months fighting a doctor that didn't want to do tests.

If we 'listened to the experts' my family member would be dead.

Were there symptoms in stage 1?

Yes, thats why we went to see the docyor in the first place. Instead our concerns were dismissed

'listened to the experts'.

On this note, get a second opinion for things. I went into brain surgery under a misdiagnosis from one doctor. Appointments take time, especially with specialists, but try hard and maybe carefully reach out to over-seas doctors as well in the meantime.

Most medical diagnosis goes like this: you see a symptom, this could be caused by a dozen entirely different problems. A few of them can be easily ticked off by absence of some very clear flags in the lab result list. Others only have indicators that are much less clear, that are shared with a whole bunch of other outside-the-norm conditions, many of them perfectly fine. If you have a backlog, if instead of a list of current measurements you have a matrix of current and previous measurements, you can narrow it down much more.

Not really, very few diagnoses benefit from such historical data.

Any lab value flagged as abnormal is typically >95%ile meriting some form of further investigation (whether that’s continued follow up/repeat blood work or a different test depends on what we’re talking about).

The tests that could be physiologic for a patient outside of reference ranges (e.g. mild LFT elevations) will often just get repeated to establish stability as you propose. There isn’t a compelling argument to do this prospectively before symptoms start.

My wife's hemoglobin comes back high. It always comes back high. That's just her, it doesn't mean something's gone wrong. Some out-of-range values are meaningful (like cholesterol) by themselves, but in many cases if they're out of range but the patient is healthy it's simply something to note as normal for that patient.